One Step Beyond
Entry updated 24 April 2026. Tagged: TV.
US Television Anthology Series (1959-1961; vt Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond). ABC Films, Joseph L Schenck Enterprises, One Step Beyond Productions Inc. Created by Merwin Gerard. Produced by Collier Young. Directed and presented by John Newland. Theme music by Harry Lubin. Writers include Charles Beaumont, Gerard, Don M Mankiewicz, Larry Marcus, Howard Rodman and Gabrielle Upton. Three seasons with a total of 97 30-minute episodes. Black and white.
This contemporary rival of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) presented typically supernatural tales as docudramas supposedly based on real events, occasionally recognizable as Urban Legends. Its initial run was sponsored by the US aluminium company Alcoa: hence Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond, reduced in syndication to the more familiar One Step Beyond. All episodes were hosted and introduced by John Newland.
One frequent theme is Precognition of death or Disaster, for example in the early instalment "Night of April 14th" (27 January 1959), where a woman dreams of drowning in cold dark water; we learn that she is to honeymoon on the "unsinkable" Titanic. Various people including Abraham Lincoln himself (see Icons) have premonitions of Lincoln's death in "The Day the World Wept: The Lincoln Story" (9 February 1960). Other episodes are centred on clairvoyance (see ESP), ghosts (see Supernatural Creatures) and haunted artefacts, Hypnosis, Psi Powers, shared dreams, Reincarnation, revenants and Telepathy. In "Encounter" (12 April 1960) the pilot of a vanished aeroplane reappears in a far-off location with a claim that he was abducted by a UFO. "Where Are They?" (13 December 1960) comprises two tales of mysterious disappearances, one of a man whose Invention of a pill that turns water into gasoline presumably – as in many an Urban Legend – attracted the malign attention of Big Oil. The final instalment, "Eyewitness" (4 July 1961), has a US newspaper editor in 1833 reporting the eruption of Krakatoa long before the news could have made its way around the world.
Many of the playlets were effective and memorable, if never particularly original. Numerous actors made guest appearances, including Warren Beatty, Christopher Lee of Dracula movie fame, Patrick Macnee (see The Avengers) and William Shatner. The show was later relaunched by Gerard and Young as The Next Step Beyond (1978-1979), with Newland again as host: this series ran to 25 instalments, fourteen being remakes of One Step Beyond scripts. There have been various DVD releases.
Despite its subtitle and copyright credit to One Step Beyond Productions, Inc, Paul W Fairman's The World Grabbers: A Dramatic Novel Inspired by the Popular TV Program, One Step Beyond (1964) is not a direct novelization of any series episode or episodes. [DRL]
further reading
- Gary Gerani. Fantastic Television: A Pictorial History of Sci-Fi, the Unusual and the Fantastic from Captain Video to the Star Trek Phenomenon and Beyond (New York: Harmony Books/Crown Publishing, 1977) with Paul H Schulman [nonfiction: hb/photographic]
- John Kenneth Muir. An Analytical Guide to Television's One Step Beyond (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2001) [nonfiction: hb/]
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